Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

show were removed from the opening film credits and opening of the “Carousel Waltz.” They return, however, in the film with a new meaning on two occasions to underscore the darker menacing presence of Mrs. Mullin a few minutes before the “Soliloquy” and again shortly after Billy’s death, and a third time to announce the carnival troupe during Louise’s ballet.

In the end, the mixture of fantasy and realism that worked so well onstage fails to persuade. Mast, the film critic who pronounced this Rodgers and Hammerstein adaptation “the worst of the lot,” finds fault with nearly every aspect but saves his sharpest comments for the director: “Henry King’s direction captures a styleless visual void—from a papier maché forest beside a backlot … to a tacky electric-blue heaven strung with plastic Stars of Bethlehem; to a real beach where a soliloquizing Billy wanders in thought (but never picks up a pebble, sifts some sand, or touches a rock).”8It is possible that the musical film Carousel has negatively prejudiced many viewers against the show. In any event, of all the films from the Rodgers and Hammerstein era, Carousel is perhaps most in need of a film remake. This might happen. In 2006, an article in FirstShowing.net announced that the popular Australian movie and stage actor Hugh Jackman, who successfully portrayed Curly in the film adaptation of Trevor Nunn’s London stage revival of Oklahoma!, had acquired the rights for Carousel and is looking for a director and a screenwriter.9 Once everyone recovers from the financial debacle of Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), Jackman’s most recent star vehicle, it may be time to welcome a new turn on the carousel.

Kiss me, Kate (1953)

In the light of its MGM predecessors On the Town, which butchered Bernstein’s great 1944 score in its screen version of 1949, and the remake of Show Boat in 1951, which cut many songs and played havoc with both the script and spirit of its original, the film adaptation of Kiss Me, Kate, directed by Show Boat alumnus George Sidney and starring Show Boat film alumni Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel, was remarkably faithful. By later standards, however, the film adaptation has a long way to go in terms of fidelity to its increasingly respected source, the Broadway version. Sidney begins by taking a major structural liberty in his decision to open the film in Fred’s apartment a month or so earlier than the first rehearsal rather than beginning with the stage show’s opening rehearsal number, “Another Opnin,’ Another Show.” In addition to “Another Opnin,’” another song gone from the film was “Bianca,” which Porter wrote for the character Bill Calhoun under duress when the actor who played him, Harold Lang, insisted he was contractually entitled to a song. In the chapter on Kiss Me, Kate (chapter 10), we noted Porter’s erroneous belief that the song’s banality would preclude its use.

Kiss Me, Kate, 1953 film. Cole Porter (Ron Randell), Lilli Vanessi (Kathryn Grayson), Lois Lane (Ann Miller), and Fred Graham (Howard Keel) in Fred’s apartment after a run-through of “So In Love.”

Kiss Me, Kate, 1953 film. Petruchio (Keel) gives his new fiancée Katharine (Grayson) an unscripted paddling to conclude the first act of “Taming of the Shrew.”

Also absent from the film was the choral number, “I Sing of Love,” which those familiar with the cast album also never got to hear, and most of the two parallel finales in which the vitriol and the martial nature of the former is replaced by the tender words and musically lyrical qualities of the latter. Partially compensating for these quasi-operatic omissions is the insertion of a dazzlingly jazzy song and dance number originally composed for Porter’s Out of this World, for Lois (Miller), her suitor (Tommy Rall), her former suitors (Bobby Van and Bob Fosse), and their new girlfriends (Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne). In marked contrast to the Pal Joey and Kurt Weill films we looked at in act I, the Kiss Me, Kate screenplay, greatly shortened in the transition from stage to film, effectively creates a sequence of songs occasionally interrupted by five minutes or less of dialogue.

The show’s principal ballad is the first of two songs to undergo a new context. Although the final A section of “So in Love” will eventually be heard in its rightful position as a reprise, sung by Lilli in her dressing room before the show moves to its Padua phase and “We Open in Venice,” its main dramatic purpose in the film occurs in its new context as an audition number in Fred’s apartment, a song performed by Fred to interest the prospective dramatic lead Lilli in the show. The character impersonating Cole Porter (Ron Randell), a depiction only slightly more believable than the casting of Cary Grant in Night and Day (1946), sits down at the piano (later joined by an invisible orchestra), and Fred starts the love song. Even before the second A section Lilli joins in, and immediately making the song her own, sings the second A by herself. Fred starts the B and is answered by Lilli, a process repeated in the final A before both Fred and Lilli conclude the song in glorious harmony and ardent glances. In the stage version Lilli sings the song alone in the dressing room unheard by Fred, and Fred sings a reprise in act II unheard by Lilli.

In contrast to the gradual unfolding of Fred and Lilli’s love onstage, before seven minutes have gone by in the film, viewers in this medium hear and see that they are deeply in love. Fred may be infatuated with the sexy Lois (Bianca), but the flirtation is fundamentally innocent, or at least superficial. In any event, Fred’s attentions are not seriously reciprocated by Lois, who is using Fred to further her show business career and that of her boyfriend Bill Calhoun (Lucentio). Despite its fundamental meaninglessness, the dalliance between Lois and Fred leads to an incriminating note intended for Lois but mistakenly